Friday, August 05, 2022

Completion of a long project


This is an electronic weather station of sorts that I assembled from a variety of electronic parts and soldered together on a protoboard.

At the heart of the weather station is a HUZZAH 32 made by Adafruit in Manhattan New York. The HUZZAH 32 is an ESP32 microprocessor with WiFi hosted on an Adafruit Feather wing breakout board along with a USB connector, a battery connecter, a voltage regulator, and pinouts making the ESP32 microprocessor very easy to use. The ESP32 can be programmed using the Arduino IDE or Python.

I also added an Adafruit Ada Logger which is a Real Time Clock with battery backup and a micro SD card reader/writer. I am only using the SD card feature.

I connected a DHT22 digital temperature and humidity sensor. It is easy to use and works very well.

Then I connected a BMP388 pressure and temperature sensor. This did not work according to specifications but with some arithmetic I was able compensate for its error.

The really cool sensor is the PMSA003I air quality sensor that measures particulate mater in the air. It measures dust, smoke, pollen, etc. from 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air to as little as 0.03 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

Finally I wrote a program to pull it all together. The program does more than just read data from all the sensors, it also saves the reading to the micro SD memory card and makes the readings available via a web page accessible over WiFi.

It took much longer to develop the program than it did to wire and solder everything together -- which took several days.

I might eventually add a rain gauge and weather camera to it but for now I consider the project to be complete.

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